r/ArtConnoisseur

It is the height of the long siege that began in the autumn of 1627. La Rochelle, the great Protestant stronghold on the Atlantic coast, has held out against the forces of Louis XIII for more than a year. The English have been trying to send relief by sea, and the cardinal, acting as the king’s chief minister and master of the operations, has ordered a massive barrier built across the harbor entrance. Engineers sank ships filled with stone, then raised a long stone and timber dike nearly a mile and a half across the channel, spiked with wooden stakes called chandeliers that would tear the hulls of any vessel daring to approach. The wall turned the open sea into a closed trap. Food ran out inside the city and by October 1628 the defenders were starving, so the place finally surrendered.

Motte places us right on that temporary fortress. The cardinal is alone at the center of the canvas. He is in a red cape of his ecclesiastical rank under an armor. On his left, a handful of his officers and clergy are gathered. One monk in a black robe holds a red hat in his hands, another older man in black is beside him with white hair, and a soldier in helmet is pointing toward the horizon. A bearded fellow in a fur-trimmed cloak can also be seen, all of them close as if they are talking about the ships in the distance. Out on the restless sea a fleet of vessels battle the wind and the blockade.

Henri-Paul Motte began his career not only as a history painter but as a trained architect and decorator, paths that clearly shaped the precision and sense of scale in works like this one. In 1872, while still a young man studying under Charles-Auguste Questel, he and two classmates won the competition to redesign the Temple Neuf in Strasbourg after the Franco-Prussian War. Their plans were later executed by another architect, but the experience left Motte with a deep understanding of structural engineering.

A few years after the Richelieu painting appeared at the 1881 Salon, Motte turned his mind toward spectacle. In 1890 he devised and patented a rotating panorama he called the Cyclorama, which was a mechanical theater that simulated the sensation of traveling by train. Spectators sat in a stationary carriage while painted landscapes unrolled past the windows on a continuous moving belt, with changing light and sound effects that sold the idea of speed and distance. That device was part of the late-nineteenth-century craze for immersive entertainments.

Later in life Motte settled in Bourg-la-Reine, outside Paris, and kept a summer house on the granite coast of Brittany at Trégastel. When he died in 1922 his body was first buried locally and then transferred, according to family wishes, to the small cemetery overlooking the pink rocks and Atlantic water he had loved. For decades the simple granite tomb, marked only with his name, that of his English-born wife Constance, and the phrase “artiste peintre,” received almost no visitors. Only in recent years have local historians rediscovered the grave.

In this piece the Trojans have found an enormous wooden horse left on the shore by the departing Greeks, and they have decided it must be a sacred offering to Pallas Athena. The Latin words painted right on the horse’s flank, PALADI VOTUM, declare it an offering to her. So the whole city has turned out to bring the gift inside the walls.

Somewhere near the center background, Cassandra is being held back. She is the daughter of King Priam, gifted with the power to see what is coming, and she has cried out that this horse carries ruin. No one listens. The people around her treat her as mad, and the procession keeps rolling forward. This was never meant to be a finished work. It is a preparatory sketch, one of a pair that Tiepolo made as he planned larger canvases telling the story of Troy’s fall. The companion piece shows the Greeks building the horse outside the walls.

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo spent much of his early career working alongside his father Giambattista in the great decorative projects that defined Venetian painting of the mid eighteenth century. Domenico had already proven his independent hand years earlier at the Villa Valmarana near Vicenza, where he decorated the guest house with scenes of peasant life and carnival while his father filled the main rooms with episodes from Homer and Virgil.

After his father’s death in Madrid in 1770, Domenico returned to Venice and continued to explore this more satirical vein for the rest of his life.

In a simple bothy, you see a wooden coffin on trestles, and it is covered by a plaid shawl probably the one that once kept the old shepherd warm. The collie is curled against the side of the coffin. No one else is in the room. The human visitors have gone, leaving the dog as the only living presence beside the body of the man it followed for years, watching the flocks and bringing back the strays.

On a stool nearby you see the shepherd’s spectacles and his closed Bible. His bonnet and walking stick are even on the floor, set aside for good. Landseer painted this in 1837, working from his deep knowledge of dogs and the Highland world he loved, and the picture hangs now in the Victoria and Albert Museum after coming there through the Sheepshanks gift.

When the painting appeared at the Royal Academy in 1837 it was liked, yet it did not become legendary until John Ruskin wrote about it a few years later in the first volume of Modern Painters. Ruskin called it one of the most perfect pictures modern times had seen and then went on to describe exactly why. He pointed to the clear painting of the coffin wood and the folds of the blanket, the way the dog is pressed hard against the side, and the tearful look of the eye that showed no change had come since the last nail was driven home. Those details, he said, were thoughts that lifted the whole scene into the realm of high art. Ruskin’s words travelled widely, and the small canvas suddenly stood for something larger than a sentimental dog piece.

The painting’s reach grew further through the engravings that followed. Within a year of the exhibition Benjamin Phelps Gibbon produced a fine print that sold very well, and later versions by other hands kept appearing for decades. Those affordable images found their way into ordinary homes across Britain and beyond. Late in the century animal-protection societies took the picture up as their own. In 1881 the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals reproduced it in their magazine Our Dumb Animals and called it eminently appropriate. For them the dog’s grief was evidence that animals have same capacity for sorrow that humans claim for themselves.

A thick fog has wrapped the land, and through this veil you can see a line of monks, their habits disappearing into the gray and fading as they advance. At the head of the group a processional cross can be see, it's the only marker guiding them deeper into the mist. On the right you see a tall Gothic wayside shrine, and it’s a little weathered.

Oehme painted this after his time studying in Italy, yet it is still rooted in the Dresden Romantic circle he knew so well, the influence of Caspar David Friedrich still strong in the way the scene is between what can be seen and what is beyond sight. Contemporaries understood the monks following the cross through the fog as a kind of parable for human life itself, the word for fog in German reading as the reverse of the word for life, the figures moving toward some larger eternity that the mist promises. In German the word for fog is Nebel, and if you read those letters backwards they spell Leben, the word for life. Oehme never needed to explain the idea in words; the painting says it in the way the way the path itself seems to lead beyond what the eye can follow.

Until Oehme was nearly twenty he earned his living as a clerk and assistant to a gate keeper who also collected taxes. He taught himself the beginnings of landscape, working without formal lessons until a local art lover named Johann Gottlob von Quandt noticed those early sketches and brought him to the attention of the Crown Prince of Saxony. The young painter’s first major success, which was a winter scene of monks approaching a cathedral, moved the prince so much that he provided the money for a long study trip to Italy. When Oehme returned in 1825 he carried new skills and friendships, yet the older Dresden atmosphere still remained in him, and three years later he painted this piece.

In this piece Webbe has set down a barn owl on a rough wooden beam. The bird fills most of the narrow upright space. The right wing has brown tones that John Ruskin singled out when the painting hung at the Royal Academy that same year, calling the study thorough and the brown wing excellent.

To the left of the owl’s talons you see a small mouse, the recent catch that tells you the bird has been out hunting and has now returned to its chosen beam. Everything is rendered with the attention that Webbe learned from the Pre-Raphaelite habit of looking hard at the natural world. He had trained earlier in Düsseldorf under the Nazarene painters, then returned to England and settled for a time at the Isle of Wight, where this piece was painted. By the mid-1850s he had taken the new English way of truth to nature to heart, and it is evident here.

You know, one of the things that always draws me back to this painting is the path it took through the hands of two of the most dedicated naturalists in Victorian England. William John Broderip, the lawyer and passionate collector who helped found the Zoological Society of London, seems to have acquired the work soon after Webbe finished it in 1856. Broderip filled his chambers at Gray’s Inn with shells, and specimens, and this white owl, with its freshly caught mouse, would easily be among them. He showed great affection for owls in his own books, so this painting must have felt like a companion to his observations.

After Broderip’s death in 1859 the painting passed, almost certainly as a gift or bequest, to Professor Richard Owen, the great comparative anatomist who was then overseeing the natural history collections at the British Museum. Owen and Broderip were in the same scientific circles, both fellows of the Royal Society, and Owen would have recognised at once the accuracy of Webbe’s rendering of the barn owl. The work stayed within Owen’s family for generations, moving through private rooms until, more than a century and a half later, it surfaced again in a Hampshire attic during a clear-out for a plumber. Jane Cordery, an art teacher, and her partner James Ravenscroft found the dusty board among old clothes and toys; Ravenscroft recalled receiving it years earlier as a gift from his mother, though the connection to Owen’s line had long faded from memory.

This painting by Rosso Fiorentino is one of the most interesting pieces by the Florence painter. Today it’s in the Pinacoteca Civica di Volterra but it was initially meant to be in a chapel (Cappella della Croce di Giorno) inside the church of San Francesco in Volterra. What always strikes me in this painting, as in general in his oevres, is the striking use of colour. Mind for instance how jesus’ skin colour is green, an iperrealism meant to signify death. At the same time also the reflections on the clothing is stunning, especially on the top left.

Even Vasari points out the quality of his colours in his second version of the Vite (1568, in the first edition of 1550 he still includes this artist but the paragraph in which his stylistic traits, such as colour and invention, are cited is missing). Another striking characteristic of Rosso Fiorentino is his “devil like” figures, which generated a very interesting anecdote on his hence most famous painting, Pala dello Spedalingo (1518), which might need a separate post.

Rosso Fiorentino is also known for the traumas of his life. An interesting trauma is the Sack of Rome of 1927 (André Chastel wrote a very interesting book on this traumatic event and its impact on renaissance art and artists), with which see how the deposition of 1928 that he made for San Sepolcro, clearly differs in style: much darker, many more devil like figures and, if you look closely in the back, a figure that looks like a monkey. It is said that he used to live with a monkey. This painting is full of traits that go outside the norm of painting and this also deserves a separate post to point them out.

Another trauma is the conjure towards his collaborator and friend once he was working in the gallery of Fontainebleau for which he had designed the walls and the juxtaposition between painted surface and the rest. For this accusation, which lead to the torturing of his friend, in the end released for lack of evidence by the judges in Paris, he committed suicide, not being able to take the shock.

This painting can be found in the Royal Academy of Arts in London, it is a piece Landseer gave them as his diploma work when they elected him a full member the following year. A knight in full armour lies on his back where he fell and his sword is near his right hand. Under the knight's body is his horse. The battle has long since moved on or ended, leaving this aftermath under a darkening sky.

And there, at the centre of it all, you see the hound. Landseer had a gift for painting animals so that you feel what they felt at any given moment, and here the hound becomes the centre of the whole painting. It is mourning the man who will not rise again. You sense the years of companionship that led to this moment, the shared roads and the trust that outlasts everything else.

Landseer painted this when he was still in his late twenties, already known for the way he could give dogs and horses the remarkable depth of feeling. It belongs to a group of works from those years in which he returned again and again to the attachment between a man and his animal companion. Some have linked the scene to the old Border ballad of Chevy Chase, the bloody clash that grew out of a hunting party mistaken for an invading force, a story Sir Walter Scott had brought back into the public ear. Others think of the real story of Charles Gough, who fell on Helvellyn in 1805 and whose dog stayed beside the body for weeks until it was found. Landseer may have drawn inspiration from both, or from the Romantic air of the time that loved these tales of loyalty. Either way, the finished canvas was very impactful.

Landseer showed his gift for animals almost from the moment he could hold a pencil. His father, an engraver who believed ordinary schooling did more harm than good to a young artist, sent the boy out into the fields around Marylebone when Edwin was only five or six so he could sketch the sheep, goats and donkeys grazing there. By the age of eleven he had already won the silver palette of the Society of Arts for his animal drawings, and at thirteen he was exhibiting at the Royal Academy. The older painter Benjamin Robert Haydon took an interest in the teenager and urged him to dissect a lion carcass so he would understand the muscle and bone beneath the skin. Landseer spent long hours among the wild beasts at Exeter Exchange and the Tower menagerie, learning the living forms. That early discipline remained with him all his life and gave his later paintings their startling accuracy.

Hello everybody, I’ve been putting quite some effort in the posts for this community, hoping they’d be looked at as an act of collaboration and as of being part of a community. Unfortunately however for some reason they’ve been taken down twice by the moderator. Sure that there’s a reasonable motivation behind this, I’ve promptly texted the moderator after the removal of the first post, asking if there was something wrong with my content and/or if there were something to change in order to best comply with the rules of the community.

I haven’t received an answer and today, the day after the first post and the chats, I’ve tried to post again, this time another painting as I thought that maybe the first one (Xanti Schawinsky) was too different as too modern compared to the ones proposed by the page. For this reason I chose my favourite Rosso Fiorentino…

Nothing happened until… also this one got deleted by the moderator who still hasn’t answered… Bot alert?

I would love to able to share thoughts on art freely, I’m sorry if my posts don’t comply with the rules but I’ve followed all the community rules in the description so if there’s something I’m missing please somebody let me know. I left the two previous posts attached for reference.

Thank you all in advance!

In this painting an old god has decided that nothing and no one will take what is his. Rubens painted it between 1636 and 1638 for King Philip IV of Spain, one piece in a whole series of mythological scenes meant for the walls of the Torre de la Parada. The story comes straight from the old myths, the ones Ovid tells in the Fasti, where Saturn, the Roman name for the Greek Titan Cronus, learns from an oracle that one of his own sons will overthrow him the same way he once overthrew his father. So every time Rhea gives birth to a boy, Saturn takes the infant and swallows him whole.

Saturn is nearly life-size, and in his right hand he holds the a scythe, a tool that points to him being the god of harvests and of time itself. His left hand holds a small boy, and Saturn’s mouth is already closed around the soft flesh of the chest. You can almost feel the pressure of those teeth, the sudden resistance of the child. Above them, in the dark sky, you see three stars shining. The middle one is brighter, the two smaller ones are on either side. Rubens was aware of Galileo’s observations from a few decades earlier, the ones that made the planet Saturn look as if it had two companion stars instead of the rings we know today. So Rubens placed them there.

Look closely and you can still see the small adjustments Rubens made while the paint was wet: a slight shift in the curve of the right arm, a repositioning of the left heel. These visible pentimenti reveal an artist who trusted his eye and his brush completely in his later years. He no longer needed to define every muscle; instead he suggested the force of the body through strokes and deliberate distortions.

Trelis, the Spanish painter born in Alcoy in the Alicante region, spent years honing a realist hand, first with landscapes and later with portraits of people from cultures he met on his travels. Eventually he shifted toward something larger and darker, and this piece is the result.

High in the center of the canvas you see a skeletal figure covered in white robes. The figure seems to be playing the violin and everything else in the painting is answering to that music. There are monks in their habits, soldiers in dented armor, and a circle of bright red figures dancing right at the base of the white radiance. You can even see sparks and embers float through the darkness.

The entire painting feels like the old Christian Requiem Mass, the long prayer for the dead that begins with the plea for eternal rest and moves through judgment, mercy, and the hope of light. Trelis lets the music become the presence of death, which is the force that gathers every kind of human life. The white figure is almost the only pure brightness; everything else is in browns, reds, and grays, so your eye keeps returning to that violin and death.

Ignacio Trelis spent his early years immersed in the disciplined traditions of classical European painting. He trained at the Spanish Academy in Rome where the emphasis on precise draftsmanship and color from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shaped his eye. Further studies across several academies on the continent refined his handling of oil paint until he worked closely under the Spanish master Paco Barrachina who taught him the layering of glazes and the modeling of human anatomy. Those years produced a young artist already capable of rendering landscapes earning him exhibitions throughout Spain and even his own gallery space in Valencia where collectors sought out the effects he achieved on canvas and panel.

Carus was a doctor, a naturalist, and a painter who had known Goethe himself, he was really obsessed with the Faust story. He wrote letters about it, painted earlier scenes from it, and late in life moved to large charcoal drawings. This piece belongs to that final group, now kept in the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden.

The room is high and narrow, Faust is seated with his back to us. Carus knew Goethe’s opening scene by heart: the scholar who has studied philosophy, law, medicine, and theology, only to feel that he still knows nothing, who opens the window and longs to walk in the moonlight, yet remains trapped among his worm-eaten volumes. In this painting that longing very evident.

As a young medical student in Leipzig, Carus first encountered the drama in literary evenings, and decades later, after the 1829 premiere in Dresden, he poured his reflections into a set of letters published in 1835. In those pages he treated Faust as an emblem of the human soul, a collective psyche moving through stages of unconscious striving toward what he called its highest divine fulfillment. The scholar who sits alone in this piece, is the same restless spirit Carus described, one whose conscious knowledge keeps falling short while deeper forces continue to pull him forward.

Carus trained as a doctor of medicine and philosophy by the age of twenty-two, he rose to become professor of obstetrics in Dresden, court physician to the Saxon kings, and a researcher who first described the circulation of blood in insects and contributed the concept of the vertebrate archetype that later fed into evolutionary thinking. At the same time he was teaching himself to paint under the guidance of Caspar David Friedrich, exchanging letters and specimens with Goethe for nearly a decade, and writing treatises that placed the unconscious at the center of mental life long before such ideas were common. He believed the key to conscious experience was in the depths of the unconscious, and he saw Faust’s journey as the clearest artistic demonstration of that principle.

This painting shows Ulysses return home after twenty long years of war and wandering, and the only one who knows him is the dog he left behind as a young pup. Ulysses stands there on what was once his own palace terrace, looking out over the sea. He is barefoot, and in a ragged tunic with a rough bag of animal skin. No one is meant to know who he is. Not even the people who once knew him best. But the dog does.

Argus is stretched out on the pavement near the marble columns. His body is wasted, ribs showing clearly through the thin coat, and weak from years of neglect while the household fell apart without its master. Homer tells us he had been left on a dung heap outside the gates, covered in ticks, too old and forgotten to hunt the way he once did when the young men of Ithaca took him out after goats and deer. Yet his eyes look up at the man standing near him with a recognition that needs no words.

In the story Argus dies moments later, having held on through two decades of waiting until the one person who mattered walked past him again. Rivière shows the exact second of that meeting. Briton Rivière approached the painting of animals with a seriousness that went far beyond surface observation, and that commitment shaped every detail of the old dog here.

From childhood he spent hours at the London Zoological Gardens sketching whatever creatures he could see, and later he arranged to work in the dissecting rooms there whenever an animal died so he could study the precise structure of muscle, bone, and joint beneath the skin. He once kept the body of a fine lioness in his own studio for extended study, and he freely admitted that wild animals could never be made to hold a pose the way a human model would. Instead he built up countless small studies of movement and form over months or years until the creature existed fully in his mind. With dogs he insisted that affection was essential, saying you could never paint one properly unless you were genuinely fond of it.

At first glance, you see an image of a skull, that gives the whole composition a tactile, almost three-dimensional quality. However, upon closer inspection, the viewer discovers a hidden scene: a couple, in theatrical costumes, seated together in what appears to be a bar. This dual imagery (skull and lovers) is seamlessly blended, allowing the viewer to toggle between the two, a testament to Dalí’s early mastery of perception and visual trickery. The painting’s optical illusion is often described as clever and modern for its time, posessing an ability to surprise and engage.

Created in 1920, it is part of Dalí’s formative period, as evidenced by its inclusion in lists of his early works. At 16, Dalí was already experimenting with concepts of reality and perception, a precursor to the surrealist movement he would later champion. The painting reflects the artistic climate of the early 20th century, where artists began challenging traditional representations and exploring psychological depth. Dalí’s youth at the time of creation adds to the painting’s intrigue, showcasing a precocious talent that would evolve into the eccentric, dreamlike works for which he is famous. This early work is a bridge between his initial explorations and the more overtly surreal pieces of the 1930s, such as The Persistence of Memory.

The painting’s use of dual imagery opens it up to many different ways of understanding. One key idea is that it explores the connection between love and death. The skull in the scene, a classic reminder of mortality, suggests that death is inevitable. Meanwhile, the couple’s intimate moment highlights the beauty and fleeting nature of love. The title, L’Amour de Pierrot, refers to Pierrot, a character from commedia dell’arte who’s often linked with unrequited love and sadness. This hints that there might be a quiet sadness or sense of fate woven into the couple’s interaction, aligning with the skull’s presence. Still, all of these interpretations remain open-ended, inviting each viewer to bring their own feelings and stories when looking at the painting.

He dedicated it to all "Great" Leaders and Commanders.